No one is counting out the first half of the leak. This is the thing that people keep failing to realize. The first half was legit! Its the SECOND half that has absolutely nothing going for it. Palutena? Everyone expected her, and she was already leaked anyway (the fact that the leak later turned out to be a good fake meant nothing, it was months before it was determined to be fake). Pokemon from X/Y? Not a valid argument, anyone could guess that. Chrom? Never on the final roster. You don't just make a "mistake" like that, and if its outdated, how the hell is it outdated before the roster was even finalized?
The information is believed to be about 2 years old. Which would suggest that it was early on in development. We have no way of knowing how far Chrom made it, as a Japanese man using the word "considered" is far different from our usage of it. We simply don't know.
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Johnknight1
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thethirdkoopa have been discussing it, and they believe it might have been a miscommunication between teams. They believe that there are different teams working on different characters, hence why Sal hasn't gotten everybody, and that the plans were changed without everybody knowing. That isn't uncommon in game development apparently. TK would know. He's a game developer.
Misinformation? The rest of the leak is completely invalid and cannot be relied on for speculation.
Of course it can be used in speculation. If this guy is in the know in development, then there is legitimacy to the second leak, regardless of whether or not those characters were easy guess. Everybody knows Palutena was pretty much a given. Pretty much everybody. However, if the second leak has nothing going for it, how did he change the name from Mii to "Mii Fighter" just before E3?
Not to mention, why risk everything with Chorus Men? An off the wall character that would automatically wreck everything.
Chorus Men and Shulk are still possible, but the chances of Chorus Men are slim-to-none as there's plenty of other more notable Rhythm Heaven characters who'd be far more likely to be playable. And since any moveset with these characters would have to be developed from scratch anyway, it doesn't particularly matter which character is made playable.
I don't see how any of that makes them any less likely. The only other character that I could see getting in over them is Marshal, and that would be because of technical issues.
If these were early plans, then Sakurai getting the rights to Shulk (as others have said) would pretty much lead to him being playable unless things went sour. As I said, Chorus Men are probably going to be in the game, and again, if the Chrom part is true, then that could be identical to what happens with a Rhythm Heaven character in general. Basically, X character was considered/planned, but we chose this character instead. That could easily happen with Rhythm Heaven.
I'd bet anything that if Chorus Men were revealed in April, that everybody would be believing the leak. Even if Chrom isn't playable. Chorus Men will and in my opinion always have been the hinge for this leak. It all hinges on them.